Paralyzing winter storms put a big chill on the US economy, but how much?

HOUSTON (AP) — The deadly and widespread winter storm paralyzing much of the American East with ice, snow and cold is also taking a multi-billion dollar bite out of the U.S. economy, experts figure.

But how much? Economists and meteorologists are trying to get a handle on the disruption costs of winter weather disasters, which aren’t as easy to calculate as buildings destroyed by hurricanes, floods and fires.

“Events like this storm highlight just how interconnected our economy is with weather conditions. When major transportation hubs shut down or power grids fail, the cascading effects ripple through supply chains and business operations across multiple sectors simultaneously,” said Jacob Fooks, a research economist for Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.

Fooks said researchers don't have consensus, but most estimates suggest severe weather events collectively can cut gross domestic product by 0.5% to 2% annually — which he called “very substantial.”

With U.S. GDP at about $30 trillion annually, that would be from $150 billion to $600 billion.

Most economists, meteorologists and disaster experts said it's too early to put a legitimate cost estimate on the weekend storm and upcoming week of subfreezing temperatures. But the private company AccuWeather announced that its preliminary estimate for the storm that grounded 11,400 flights is between $105 billion and $115 billion — an amount six other experts scoffed at as far too high and insufficiently detailed.

"A lot of it comes from the disruptions that occur to commerce, the cost of power outages," AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter told The Associated Press at the annual American Meteorological Society convention in a chilly Houston. "Some businesses are going to be shut down for days or a week or more."

It's why AccuWeather is calling this “the storm that shut it all down,” Porter said. By Monday, it had killed at least 25 people.

Add to that ice toppling electrical lines leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power, tree losses, damage to cars, and all those canceled flights, Porter said. He noted it will take time to reboot air travel and restore power.

Climate economist Adam Smith, who used to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's billion-dollar weather disaster list, said this storm will easily cost multiple billions of dollars, making it the country's first billion-dollar weather disaster of 2026.

But Smith, now a senior climate impact scientist at Climate Central, said it's nowhere near as costly as AccuWeather suggests. He said the private company has been an outlier among experts in climate impacts and economics. He pointed to the private company's initial estimate of $250 billion in damage from last year's Los Angeles wildfires. Several climate, risk and insurance groups all waited to do extensive analysis and all said the real amount was around $60 billion.

AccuWeather’s estimates are much higher because they take into account the “bigger picture” of indirect and long-term costs, Porter said, including the business supply chain as well as medical costs. Most other estimates are “under-describing the challenges that people in the community and business face,’’ he said, pointing to NOAA's billion-dollar disaster page which listed factors not considered. That page says NOAA's estimates “should be considered conservative with respect to what is truly lost.”

So far, the most expensive winter storm on record in the U.S. is 2021's Texas ice storm, which cost about $26 billion, Smith and Fooks said. The 2016 Northeast blizzard cost about $3 billion, Fooks said.

Smith said this weekend's storm could approach the cost of the 2021 Texas storm because it is so widespread.

There's a big difference in the type of losses that are talked about with winter storms and other weather disasters.

Hurricanes, fires and floods cause damage to buildings, infrastructure and physical things that insurers will pay out for. In snow and ice storms, much of it is lost opportunity, which is more amorphous and harder to quantify, said Smith, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, former NOAA chief scientist Ryan Maue and former National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini.

“When we talk about the billion dollar damage, we talk about hurricane damage, we’re basically talking about insurable losses,” Maue said. “People generally aren’t renumerated for bad weather.’’

Uccellini noted it can be tricky to figure out costs of those lost opportunities, in part, because research has found there can be economic winners in winter storms — for example, the hardware store that sells more shovels and salt, and the grocery store that sells more food.

Fooks, of Colorado State, said it still seems that losses far outstrip those gains. He cited things like disruption of supply chains and business operations, response costs for emergency managers and departments of transportation, and so on.

Porter and others say regardless of how costs are calculated, they are adding up.

As the climate warms, costly weather disasters are happening “at an increasing frequency and impact around the world,” Porter said. “This is just the latest example.”

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A lineman works to restore power in Oxford, Miss. on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026, following a weekend ice storm. (AP Photo/Bruce Newman)

Power lines and shrubs are covered in ice during a winter storm Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

DC Water crews work around snow piles to repair a water main break, Monday, Jan. 26, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

Snow and ice is cleared at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Monday morning, Jan. 26, 2026, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Clouds cover the top of One World Trade, top center, as ice crowds the Hudson River in New York, Monday, Jan. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Pedestrians walk down Fifth Avenue during a winter storm, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte insisted Monday that Europe is incapable of defending itself without U.S. military support and would have to more than double current military spending targets to be able to do so.

“If anyone thinks here … that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming. You can’t,” Rutte told EU lawmakers in Brussels. Europe and the United States “need each other,” he said.

Tensions are festering within NATO over U.S. President Donald Trump’s renewed threats in recent weeks to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

Trump also said that he was slapping new tariffs on Greenland's European backers, but later dropped his threats after a “framework” for a deal over the mineral-rich island was reached, with Rutte's help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.

The 32-nation military organization is bound together by a mutual defense clause, Article 5 of NATO’s founding Washington treaty, which commits every country to come to the defense of an ally whose territory is under threat.

At NATO’s summit in The Hague in July, European allies — with the exception of Spain — plus Canada agreed to Trump’s demand that they invest the same percentage of their economic output on defense as the United States within a decade.

They pledged to spend 3.5% of gross domestic product on core defense, and a further 1.5% on security-related infrastructure – a total of 5% of GDP – by 2035.

“If you really want to go it alone,” Rutte said, “forget that you can ever get there with 5%. It will be 10%. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros.”

France has led calls for Europe to build its “strategic autonomy,” and support for its stance has grown since the Trump administration warned last year that its security priorities lie elsewhere and that the Europeans would have to fend for themselves.

Rutte told the lawmakers that without the United States, Europe “would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the U.S. nuclear umbrella. So, hey, good luck!”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, second left, arrives to address the Security and Defence Committee at the European Parliament in Brussels, Monday, Jan. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, left, addresses the Security and Defence Committee at the European Parliament in Brussels, Monday, Jan. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, center, greets the audience prior to his address during the Security and Defence Committee at the European Parliament in Brussels, Monday, Jan. 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)